Samsung Solve for Tomorrow
Safer Online
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Kickstart your tech-for-good ideas for this theme!
Big picture: What does “safer online” mean for young people?
Internet Matters’ Children’s Wellbeing in a Digital World 2026 report explored how technology is affecting young people’s lives. The report found that the internet brings huge benefits for learning, creativity and friendship, but also highlighted a number of challenges where better technology, design and innovation could make a real difference.
1. Supporting healthy and balanced technology use
2. Avoiding inappropriate content and unsafe interactions
3. Preventing online bullying
Online communities can help people build friendships, share interests and find support. However, harmful interactions can spread quickly online. Young people who spend the most time online are much more likely to experience bullying, abusive or upsetting messages, but new ideas can help encourage kindness and positive online communities.
4. Protecting personal data
5. Tackling misinformation
Anyone can create and share content online, making it hard to know what is trustworthy. False or misleading information is the most common online harm reported by children, affecting 37% of young people. As AI-generated content and deepfakes become more common, helping young people identify reliable information is becoming increasingly important.
In the news
In June 2026, the Youth Justice Board published new research highlighting the impact of online harms on young people’s wellbeing and calling for more “safety-by-design” and “teen-by-default” approaches. The report identified cyberbullying as one of the key risks facing children online highlighting the need for new ideas that help create safer and more positive online communities.
Problem spotlight: How can we help prevent bullying online?
Online bullying can take many forms, including hurtful messages, harassment, exclusion from online groups and repeated negative comments. Technology companies have developed a range of tools to tackle the problem, but each has strengths and weaknesses. So what solutions already exist?
Blocking and muting tools
Main strengths:
- Gives users quick control over who can contact them.
- Can immediately reduce exposure to harmful messages.
Challenges:
- Bullies can often create new accounts.
- Often treats bullying as isolated incidents rather than recognising wider patterns of behaviour.
Reporting systems
Main strengths:
- Creates a record of harmful behaviour.
- Can help identify repeat offenders.
Challenges:
- Relies on young people reporting problems sometimes repeatedly, and with little information about what comes next.
- Tends to respond after harm has occurred rather than preventing it.
Comment and message filters
Main strengths:
- Can reduce exposure to harmful content.
- Works at a scale that would be impossible for human moderators alone.
Challenges:
- Filters often rely on keywords and struggle to recognise context, sarcasm, exclusion or subtle forms of bullying.
- It can either miss harmful content or incorrectly block harmless content.
Wellbeing and support tools
Main strengths:
- Provides access to support when it is needed.
- Helps young people understand their options and seek help.
Challenges:
- Support is often separate from where bullying takes place.
- Focuses on helping people cope with harm rather than preventing it.
Positive community and bystander tools
Main strengths:
- Encourages positive behaviour as well as discouraging harmful behaviour.
- Helps build a stronger sense of community responsibility.
Challenges:
- Most platforms are better at detecting harmful behaviour than encouraging positive behaviour.
- Young people who want to help often lack clear ways to do so safely.
Your challenge
Many current solutions focus on reacting to bullying after it happens. Others can be difficult to use, ignore important context, or rely on users taking action themselves.
Could you:
- Make reporting easier and more effective?
- Help platforms spot and stop bullying earlier?
- Help prevent harmful behavior in the first place, or stop it from reaching others?
- Encourage more positive online behaviour?
- Create tools that better support people affected by bullying?
- Develop a completely new approach that tackles a weakness in existing solutions?
The challenge: How might technology help create safer, kinder and more positive online communities for young people?
Remember:
This spotlight is just one example of a real-world issue within the Safer Online theme. Explore a challenge that interests you!